With the amount of information available at the fingertips of consumers nowadays, it’s more important than ever to nurture prospective buyers throughout their shopping journey. The average boat buyer shops for around 60-90 days, if not longer, before making their final purchase. With a big-ticket purchase like a boat, consumers take ample time to do their research online reading reviews, shopping on 3rd party marketplaces, cross-shopping dealership websites, etc. It’s critical to stay in front of these prospects throughout their journey to ensure you are top of mind when they are ready to make their purchase.
We think one of the best ways to help dealers nurture prospective boat buyers is via dynamically generated inventory ads on Facebook and Instagram. We’ve built a product called BoatFuel that does exactly that. BoatFuel puts available units from a dealer’s inventory directly into buyers’ news feeds. By automating multiple touch points, a dealership can keep its inventory and brand top of mind throughout a prospect's purchasing decision.
As prospects interact with the ads and click through to listing detail pages (LDPs) on dealer’s websites, the technology learns and tailors the next ad to their unique shopping behavior. This continuous personalization of the ads is a key component to the success our dealer partners have seen leveraging BoatFuel to nurture prospective boat buyers.
We’ve found that the more often a dealer gets a shopper to their website, the higher the likelihood they sell that prospect a boat. Plain and simple. It’s not enough getting a prospect to visit your website once anymore.Through the intelligent retargeting that BoatFuel deploys, we bring shoppers back to our dealer’s websites multiple times throughout their shopping journey, keeping that dealership and their inventory top of mind.
Another outstanding way to nurture prospective buyers throughout their shopping journey is leveraging streaming media. (Online Video, Connected TV, Streaming Audio) Streaming media affords dealers the opportunity to stay top of mind year-round with in-market shoppers, while reducing budget waste drastically when compared to traditional TV and radio advertising. When deployed properly by media buying experts, streaming media only displays video and audio ads to people who have either been actively shopping on your website, or have been actively shopping on other sites across the web. This ensures that ad budget is not being spent advertising to people who are not actively interested in purchasing a boat. Furthermore streaming media is considerably less expensive, and offers infinitely better measurement than TV and radio advertising.Through Octane’s streaming media campaigns, our dealers have access to the exact reach and frequency by device, clicks to their website, and view-through conversions which track users who see and/or hear an ad, did not click on it, but end up back on their website within 30 days. For these reasons, we highly recommend our dealer partners deploy an “always on” streaming strategy to help nurture prospective buyers in their markets.
If you’d like to learn more about any of the strategies discussed in this article, please contact us. Our team of marine marketing experts would be happy to set up some time to talk through how we can help your dealership win by nurturing prospective buyers throughout their shopping journey.
